The Encyclopedia of Unsolved Crimes – Page 103
Michael Newton – Infobase Publishing, 2009 – 436 pages
A fanatical offshoot of the Nation of Islam (Black Muslims), the Death Angels cult was apparently founded in California, in late 1969 or early 1970. Members adhere to the Black Muslim dogma that whites are “beasts” and “grafted devils” spawned from ancient genetic experiments, but members of the new cult carried their beliefs into action, purposefully striving to exterminate Caucasians. On joining the cult, new recruits were photographed, afterward earning their “ wings” (drawn on the snapshot in ink) by killing a specified number of whites…http://books.google.com/books?id=gijG7fSwvjAC&pg=PA103

Popular Paranoia: A Steamshovel Press Anthology – Page 170
Kenn Thomas – Adventures Unlimited Press, 2002 – 298 pages – [ISBN 1931882061, 9781931882064]
To become a Death Angel, a member supposedly had to kill either nine white males , five white females, or four white children in order to earn their “wings”. This was supposed to guarantee the killer a place in Mecca in the afterlife…http://books.google.com/books?id=bkGrNwr04VkC&pg=PA170

Bill Cosby Is Right: But What Should the Church Be Doing about It? – Page 191
Merisa Parson Davis – Xulon Press, 2010 – 356 pages
The Zebra Murders The Zebra killings are a largely forgotten series of hate crimes that occurred in the San Francisco Bay area in the early 1970’s. They were a series of 14 serial murders carried out by convicted members of the NOI in San Francisco, California in 1973 and 1974. They were dubbed the “Zebra” murders because of the radio channel frequency— Channel Z— used by the police investigation using the case. The name “Zebra” would take on more sinster maening … To attain Death Angel status, candidates were expected to kill a certain…http://books.google.com/books?id=yNHUyuxbcDYC&pg=PA191

Why Do Muslims Murder Americans?
7 Jul 2010 – […] In 1955, the FBI described the Nation of Islam as an “Especially Violent and Anti-American Cult”. Its publication contained the quote, “Of all the governments in the world, there has never existed one so wicked as America, which has misled the holy people of Allah.”. The FBI internal bulletin found that the Nation of Islam presents “…a threat to the National Security of the United States.”

The Nation of Islam murdered “infidels” who left the movement or criticized Elijah Muhammad. Some were stunningly brutal, the murder of an entire family in Philadelphia, including drowning two infants<. But the worst was yet to come. Unlike the Son of Sam or the Zodiac killer, the Zebra Murders , which took place in San Francisco in 1973 have been generally forgotten… because they are politically incorrect.

The full number of those murdered by the “Death Angels” of the Nation of Islam may never be known. Estimates range anywhere from 71 to over 200. Those targeted were children as young as 11 year old Michele Denise Carrasco and as old as 81-year-old janitor Ilario Bertuccio. Salvation Army cadets, college students, a retired coast guardsman. The victims were shot, mutilated, raped or decapitated. Some were so badly mutilated that their identities have never been learned.The killers were Nation of Islam members and in some cases used NOI businesses to carry out their atrocities. Their defense was paid for by the Nation of Islam. The horrifying crimes had been committed because the Black Muslim perpetrators believed that murder was their “ticket to heaven”.http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/25122

KILLERS
Now There’s a Sniper Loose on the Right Coast
S.F.’s own time of terror
Stephanie Salter, Insight Staff Writer

San Francisco Chronicle October 13, 2002 04:00 AM Copyright San Francisco Chronicle. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Sunday, October 13, 2002

A pall of fear settled over the city. People stayed home after dark. Night business trailed off. The police were out in force.

— Gale Cook, San Francisco Examiner, March 14, 1976 .

It lasted for 179 days: a series of attacks on ordinary citizens going about their ordinary business on the streets of San Francisco. Before the so- called Zebra murders stopped — with the arrest of a gang of racial extremists — 15 people would die, and eight others suffer critical wounds.

“It was a very frightening time for the people of this city because of the random nature of the shootings,” said Art Agnos, a former mayor of San Francisco and one of the “lucky” victims who survived attempted murder.

“There are parallels with what is happening in Maryland,” he said of sniper attacks that by the end of last week, had left at least eight people dead and two injured in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. “But it’s probably worse now because of 9/11. People already are in a state of heightened tension. This is the worst of times for this kind of thing.”

Agnos was the target in the sixth of a string of attacks that began Oct. 20, 1973, and ended April 16, 1974.

Then an aide to state Assemblyman Leo McCarthy, Agnos was shot twice through the chest on Dec. 13, 1973, as he walked from a community meeting at 23rd and Wisconsin streets on Potrero Hill. His assailant, a lone male gunman, had come from behind, out of the shadows, and fired at Agnos’ back at close range.

The bullets ripped through his lung, kidney and colon and destroyed his spleen. He wore a colostomy bag for a year afterward and underwent months of grueling physical therapy.

“But I really was one of the lucky ones,” said Agnos.

Not so Marietta DiGirolamo. Out for a walk in her Western Addition neighborhood less than an hour after the attack on Agnos, she was stalked, shoved into the doorway of a barbershop at Haight and Buchanan streets and shot three times. She was 31.

Contrary to popular belief, “Zebra” did not come from the black-against- white racist nature of the killings — a splinter group of the Nation of Islam, called the Death Angels, required the murder of several “blue-eyed white devils” for membership. Rather, the nickname came from a special radio band — Z for Zebra — that police investigators used during their seven-month hunt.

“I worked on it, but when I think about it now, it’s like, did that happen? It seems not real, it was so far out,” said Jeff Brosch, a former San Francisco homicide inspector who now investigates murder cases for the Alameda County district attorney’s office.

A San Francisco native, Brosch was pulled from the burglary detail along with three other cops in April 1974 to beef up homicide.

“It ended up with 10 percent of the patrol task force assigned to this,” he said. “The feds were reluctant to get involved because of the religious thing, the Nation of Islam. It was a little touchy.”

“Touchy” is not the word for what resulted for a week when — after 12 deaths — a desperate Mayor Joseph Alioto ordered sweeping stop-and-search patrols that made nearly every black male over 6 feet tall a possible suspect. U.S. District Judge Alphonso Zirpoli pronounced the dragnet unconstitutional, but not before 600 African American men had been detained.

Alioto’s move “reflected the enormous anxiety and fear of people. The whole city was just in the grip of terror,” said Agnos. “But it was an ugly thing, a time when we failed our test on our commitment to civil liberties. When we are fearful, we tend to compromise that commitment too quickly.”

Acting on information from Anthony Cornelius Harris, a 28-year-old accomplice-turned-informant, more than 100 SFPD cops descended on the suspects on May 1, 1974, and the killings were over.

A year later, three of the men arrested — Manuel Moore, J.C. Simon and Larry C. Green — went on trial with a fourth man on 74 counts of murder, conspiracy and assault. The fourth defendant, Jessie Lee Cooks, had already confessed to one of the early killings — physical therapist Frances Rose on Oct. 30, 1973 — and was in Folsom Prison.

MOST SERIAL KILLINGS in America take on a life of their own through movies, books and documentaries. The crimes of Charles Manson, Jeffrey Dahmer and The Son of Sam are still well remembered years after they were committed. Yet there is one set of serial killings that has been almost completely forgotten and is rarely mentioned in popular culture.

The Zebra Killings occurred in the San Francisco bay area between 1972 and 1974 and left 71 people dead. They were dubbed the Zebra Killings because of the radio channel used by the police investigating the case (channel Z). The name would take on a more sinister meaning as it became apparent that a group of blacks was systematically stalking and killing whites simply because of the color of their skin.

Zebra (1979) was written by crime writer Clark Howard and remains the definitive book on the murders. Using court records, police reports, witnesses and interviews with the killers themselves, Howard was able to piece together the horrid details of the murders and the unrelenting hatred that inspired the killers.

The majority of the attacks were carried out by five members of a group within Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam called the “Death Angels.” Jesse Lee Cooks, J.C. Simon, Larry Green, Manuel Moore and Anthony Harris were part of this group which believed that whites were created 3,000 years ago by a black mad scientist named Yacub who wanted a race of inferiors to rule over. Death Angels believed they could earn “points” towards going to heaven when they died if they killed whites. For them, whites were not human beings but “grafted snakes,” “blue-eyed devils” and “white motherf-——s.”

Howard describes the vicious and cowardly nature of the attacks, which were made at gunpoint and mostly carried out against women and weak or old men who could not fight back. The first victims in San Francisco were a couple named Richard and Quita Hague. The Hagues were out for an after dinner walk when they were abducted at gunpoint and forced into a van. They were bound and Richard was beaten over the head with a lug wrench and knocked unconscious. Quita was sexually molested and hacked with a machete. While begging for her life she was decapitated. Before leaving, the attackers hacked at the face of the still unconscious man. Miraculously, he survived and was able to give valuable information to the police.

Brutality and a lack of remorse on the part of the criminals mark the attacks. Vincent Wollin was shot in the back and killed on his 69th birthday. Mildred Hosler, an obese, older woman was shot while frantically trying to get away from her younger, faster attacker. Ilario Bertucci, a 135-pound, 81-year-old man, was killed while walking home from work. Marietta DiGirolamo, a 5’1” white woman was shot and killed on her way to a neighborhood bar. In none of these cases did the victims do anything to provoke the murderers. They simply had white skin and were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

There were even some high profile victims. Art Agnos, who would later go on to become mayor of San Francisco, was shot and almost killed by the Death Angels. A member of the California Commission on Aging, Agnos was attending a community meeting in a black neighborhood to discuss building a government funded health clinic in the area. In the same neighborhood the killers were hunting for whites. As the meeting let out, Agnos stopped to talk with two women. One of the killers came up behind him and shot him twice in the back. The bullets ripped apart his lungs, spleen and kidneys. Bystanders called an ambulance and Agnos barely survived.

Lou Calabro was a street patrol sergeant with the San Francisco Police Department at the time and notes that as the murders added up, the SFPD came under increasing pressure to stop the killings:

“In what was known as Operation Zebra, more police were put on the street and security checks were beefed up. Despite the increased police presence, the attacks did not stop. They would often happen when we were on full alert. Some officers suspected a black cop who was a member of ‘Officers for Justice,’ a black police officers association formed to get more promotions for themselves, was tipping off the killers, though this was never proven. We were very frustrated at not being able to stop the killings.”

The increased police presence had the effect of angering the black community. Twenty years before the Los Angeles riots and O.J. Simpson trial, blacks were already making statements to the press that showed a stunning lack of remorse for what was happening to their white neighbors. Howard quotes from interviews conducted by the San Francisco Examiner in 1974. Among the responses by blacks were, “I don’t feel comfortable with all the police around. But then, I never have felt safe around them.” A young housewife stated, “I’m really glad the police are concerned for a change. I just wonder if they would be as much concerned if it were black people getting killed.” A black lawyer added, “I commend the police for their beefing up of the force, but I hope it’s not just directed at blacks. I hope blacks aren’t being harassed.”

Still other blacks blamed “unemployment” and “oppression” for the attacks. One man said, “the madness that drives black men to kill innocent people . . . involves a sickness that is as American as apple pie.” Black Panther leader Bobby Seale declared, “every black man in the Bay area is in danger of losing his life.” The Reverend Cecil Williams claimed that the entire black community was “under a police state that could erupt into a racial war.” Howard observes, “although they were responding only to a question about Operation Zebra, it was curious that none of the blacks interviewed took the occasion to condemn the unknown street killers or express sympathy for the victims.”

Detectives Gus Coreris and John Fotinos were 13-year veterans of the Homicide Unit and led the investigation which eventually cracked the case. Though they both suspected the Black Muslims, it was hard to get any information on the possible suspects because of a ban on surveillance of religious institutions. Moreover, the closed atmosphere of the NOI made it hard to get spies into the organization.

Coreris and Fotinos were able to link the murders because the killers were using the same weapon for each attack. They were also able to put together information and descriptions from those who survived such as Agnos and Hague. The case was solved when one of the members of the Death Angels came forward with information on the other killers. A total of eight black men with previous records were arrested. All were members of the Death Angels. Though this group committed most of the killings, they do not account for all of the criminals. Some are still free to this day.

The Nation of Islam paid for the legal representation of every one of the killers except Cooks, who immediately admitted to his murders. The Death Angels are still in prison but are up for parole in 2002. The European American Issues Forum (EAIF), headed by Calabro, has pledged to attend the parole hearings and work to insure that the killers spend the rest of their lives in jail. In addition, on October 19 of this year, the EAIF will hold its fifth annual Zebra Victims Memorial Service on the steps of San Francisco City Hall. As with the previous five ceremonies, government and community leaders such as Mayor Willie Brown and the leader of the local NAACP will be invited to attend. They have declined to attend any of the ceremonies so far and are not likely to show up this year. Indeed, the lack of publicity and recognition of these racially motivated hate crimes is consistent with the efforts of government agencies, civil rights groups and the media to portray European-Americans as the only perpetrators of hate crimes.

This same type of black-on-white serial murder occurred in the Miami area in the early 1990’s. The racist cult of Yahweh-ben-Yahweh began systematically killing whites in the same manor as the Death Angels. Whites were again described as subhuman “devils” by the cult leaders who urged their black followers to murder random whites. In what was strictly local news, seven whites were ritually slaughtered before the cult was stopped. The leaders of Yahweh-ben-Yahweh are also up for parole in 2002.

It has been almost 30 years since the Zebra Killings and, with the exception of Clark Howard’s book, little has been written about the murders. That is why they have disappeared from the public consciousness. At least one filmmaker who tried to get funding for a documentary on the killings has said that producers will not touch it, as it involves the taboo of black-on-white racism. Needless to say, there is no such taboo on discussing white-on-black racism. But a society that memorializes Emmett Till, Medgar Evers and James Byrd should also make room for the victims of the Zebra Killings. Justice demands it.

Paleoconservative James P. Lubinskas has written for Chronicles, The AIM Report, American Renaissance, The Social Contract, VDARE, The Nationalist Times, American Patrol and other journals.

Hair-raising, terrifying true crime, in the tradition of In Cold Blood, about the murders that held San Francisco at mercy for 179 days.

Nothing challenges a writer more than the probing of the criminal mind, particularly when that mind is closed, concealing, and motivated by an “ideal,” to Zebra, well-known crime writer Clark Howard has met that challenge with a kind of research and determination seldom encountered in fact-crime writing. Not since In Cold Blood or Helter Skelter has a true story been written with all the harrowing suspense and verve of a detective story.

This is an important as well as a chilling and exciting story, with implications that go beyond its particular events. It is the true account of five Black men who held a city in a 179-day grip of terror Provoked and guided by their leaders, these men randomly selected for kidnap, rape, robbery, mutilation and murder, 23 victims from the streets of San Francisco — any street, any time. Calling themselves Death Angels, they set a goal: to sacrifice nine “blue-eyed devils” each, for their God, Allah.

Using every avenue open to the research journalist (and some known only to the author himself) — records, reports, witnesses, surviving victims, relations, even the convicted men themselves, and the informer who risked a nightmare death to stop the killings — Howard has probed as deeply into the minds of murderers as anyone is ever likely to go. He shows us frenzied men, killing in the name of a religion that is teaching them white hatred. And he takes us into the shadows of their deepest secrets: their insecurities about color, their desire for respect, their burning ambition to rise above their status. He shows us killers as we have never seen them: caught up in a clash between right and wrong, black and white, life and death. And finally, in crime writing at its finest, he details the exhaustive police work by Detectives Gus Coreris and John Fotinos as they struggle against time and odds to track down the killers and trace the gun that will lead to conviction. The pace of fiction, the chronology of truth is at the heart of this controversial, sensational story. As with all great crime stories, Zebra is also a work of profound meaning which reminds us not only what evil we are capable of but especially what we are capable of on behalf of a cause, a political or religious commitment larger than ourselves…http://www.archive.org/details/Zebra-Clark-Howard
Title: Zebra: the true account of the 179 days of terror in San Francisco
Author: Clark Howard
Editor: R. Marek Publishers, 1979
ISBN 0399900500, 9780399900501
405 pages
A terrifying chronicle of the five Blacks who, in the name of a fanatic religion preaching white hatred, randomly selected twenty-three white men, women, and children for kidnapping, robbery, rape, mutilation, and murderhttp://books.google.com/books?id=SldsAAAAIAAJ

Violent crimes committed by Muslim extremists on US soil were not confined to the events of September 11thm 2001, the Beltway Sniper killings, and the murderous rampage of Major Nidal Malik Hasan at Fort Hood.

One of the most horrific incidents of Islamic rage has escaped the attention of the mainstream media and the American people. The mayhem was conducted in the name of Allah and resulted in the deaths of over 270 white Christians. And it occurred in California.

The killings began on October 19, 1973 when members of an elite group within the Nation of Islam (NOI), known as the Death Angels, kidnapped Richard and Quinta Hagueas while they were taking a stroll near their home on Telegraph Hill in San Francisco.

The Black Muslims forced the couple into a white van and began to sexually molest the 28 year-old Quinta. When Richard protested, a member of the squad smashed his jaw with a wrench. Following the molestation, the Muslims proceeded to decapitate her with machetes. The cuts severed her cervical spine and ripped through her carotid arteries, jugular veins, epiglottis, and hypo pharynx. “That girl’s wounds screamed out hate,” SFPD detective Earl Sanders later recalled. “Whoever cut her didn’t just cut through flesh, they cut through bone. They cut deep.”[1] The killers next turned their attention to Richard, smashing his skull with the wrench and hacking away at his face and neck with their machetes.[2]

The Killings Continue

Ten days later, Frances Rose, a 28 year-old physical therapist, was shot in the face at point blank range by Jesse Lee Cooks, a member of the Death Angels, who blocked her car and demanded a ride as she drove up to the entrance of the University of California’s Extension Campus on Laguna Street.[3]

Within the next two months, seven additional attacks took place on the streets of San Francisco, including a hit on Art Agnos, a member of California’s Commission, and the murders of Ilario Bertuccio, an 81 year-old maintenance man, Paul Dancik, a 26 year-old street junkie, Saleem Erakat, a 53 year-old grocer, and Marietta DiGirolamo who worked as a janitor for Mr. Erakat.[4]

On December 22nd, a member of the Death Angels gunned down 19 year-old Neal Moynihan in front of the Civic Center Hotel. Moynihan had just was purchased a late-minute Christmas gift –a teddy bear for his kid sister. The assassin fled down a nearby alley to Gough Street, where 50 year-old Mildred Hosler was waiting at a bus stop. He shot her four times in the left breast and then continued to jog down the street. The killer had eliminated two white people within three minutes.[5]

A Christmas Turkey

On Christmas Eve, the Death Angels captured a homeless white man and transported him to the Black Self-Help Moving & Storage Company, a business owned by the Nation of Islam, where they butchered him while he was still alive and trussed up his remains like a Christmas turkey, which they then tossed into San Francisco Bay. The body was so mutilated that the SFPD has never been able to come up with the name of the corpse. He remains known as John Doe #169.

The attacks, by now, had become so commonplace that the SFPD reserved radio frequency “Z” for communications related to the killing spree. For this reason, the crimes became known as the “Zebra Murders.” It proved to be an ironically prescient handle since the incidents involved random attacks by Black militants on White victims.

Murder Without End

The killings stopped for five weeks only to resume on January 28, 1974, with the murders of Tana Smith, a 32-year old secretary; John Bambic, 84, an avid junk collector; Jane Holly, 45, a social activist; and Vincent Wollin, who was celebrating his 69th birthday by treating himself to a doughnut and a cup of coffee.

The rampage continued with the shooting of Roxanne McMillan, a 23 year-old housewife and mother of a four-month old baby, who would spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair, and Thomas Bates, a 21-year old student who was shot three times while hitchhiking near Emeryville.

On April 1, a Death Angel stalked and shot Thomas Rainwater, 19, and Linda Story, 21, as they walked away from the Salvation Army School for Officers’ Training, where they were first-year cadets. Rainwater, who was shot three times in the back with a .32 caliber weapon, was dead at the scene. Story was shot twice, while she sought to escape from the killer’s clutches. The bullets narrowly missed her spine and she later recovered.[6]

On Easter Sunday, April 14th, the Black Muslims killed 19 year-old Ward Anderson and wounded 15 year-old Larry White on the corner of Fillmore and Hayes, where the teenagers were waiting for a bus. Two days later, they executed Nelson T. Shields, 23, heir to a prominent DuPont executive, in the Ingleside district of the city.[7]

The Angels’ Wings

The break in the case came after the SFPD posted a $30,000 reward for any information leading to the arrests of the killers. Anthony Harris, a worker at Black Self-Help & Storage, took notice. He was struggling to support a wife and baby, and $30,000 was a lot of dough to him. A few hours after he dropped a dime into a pay phone, detectives took him into custody for questioning. Harris spilled his guts, telling the cops about the Death Angels and the point system within the Nation of Islam for killing white people.[8]

Angels, according to the system, gained their “wings” upon killing four white children and five white women, or, if they preferred, nine white men. Upon attaining this quota, a photo of the Angel was taken with a pair of black wings affixed to his back. The photo was mounted on a board along with pictures of other successful candidates, and the board was displayed on an easel at Black Self-Help Moving & Storage Company location.[9]

In the pre-dawn hours of May 1st, more than 100 police officers carried out simultaneous pre-dawn raids. Forty officers were deployed to an apartment building at 844 Grove Street, where J.C. X. Simon lived in Apartment 2, and Larry Green in Apartment 7. Twenty cops charged into Black Self-Help Moving & Storage Company on Market Street, where two suspects lived. None of the men arrested in the raid offered resistance.[10]

The 10th Lesson

San Francisco Mayor Joseph Alioto held a press conference to announce that the men taken into custody were members of the Nation of Islam’s Mosque No. 26, where they aspired to become “Death Angels.” John Muhammad, the leader of Mosque No. 26, expressed indignation and demanded that the Mayor apologize for his racist remarks.[11] Muhammad, however, refused to explain Lesson No. 10 of the Nation of Islam as penned by Elijah Poole (Elijah Muhammad):

“Lesson Number Ten: Why does Muhammad and any Muslim murder the devil [the white man]? What is the duty of each Muslim in regard to four devils? What reward does a Muslim receive by presenting four devils at one time? Answers: Because he [the devil] is 100 percent wicked and will not keep and obey the laws of Islam. His ways and actions are like a snake of the grafted type. So Muhammad learned he could not reform the devils, so they had to be murdered. All Muslims will murder the devil because they know he is a snake and also if he be allowed to live, he would sting someone else. Each Muslim is required to bring four devils, and by bringing and presenting four at a time his reward is a button to wear on the lapel of his coat. Also a free transportation to the Holy City, Mecca, to see Brother Muhammad.”[12]

Outcry & Outcome

Muhammad was not the only African American to express outrage at the Mayor’s remark. The Black Liberation Army sent a communiqué to FM rock station KSAN which called for an armed uprising of all radical groups, including the SLA, the Weather Underground and the Death Angels –against the racist municipal government.[13]

The uprising never took place and the proceedings took place without the spilling of blood. Of the seven suspects taken into custody, three were later released. The remaining four – Larry Green, J. C. X. Simon, Manuel Moore and Jesse Lee Cooks, were found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison.

The Black Self-Help & Storage Company was managed by Tom Manney, a Nation of Islam member and former St. Ignatius High School and City College football star. Manney lent his black Cadillac to the murderers, who used it to hunt down their victims, and an illegal .32 pistol that was used in several of the killings. He was taken into custody only to be released for lack of evidence.[14]

Unreported Slaughter

In October 1973, when the killing spree started, there were fifteen divisions of the Death Angels within California. The California Attorney General’s Office had compiled a list of 71 execution-style murders committed around the state, either with a machete or a pistol, in which the killer – or killers – was always a well-dressed and groomed youngish black man and the victim always white. In addition to San Francisco, the murders were carried out in Oakland, San Jose, Emeryville, Berkeley, Long Beach, Signal Hill, Santa Barbara, Palo Alto, Pacifica, San Diego, Los Angeles, and in the counties of San Mateo, Santa Clara, Los Angeles, Contra Costa, Ventura and Alameda. The Nation of Islam genocide campaign had actually begun approximately three years before the San Francisco killings.[15]

It took law enforcement officials several years to come to terms with the real enormity of the crime. From 1970 to 1974, the Nation of Islam was responsible for “just under 270” Black-on-White murders in California alone.[16] How many killings occurred throughout the country has yet to be calculated.

Nor has the economic impact of the killings ever been assessed. However, clippings from the San Francisco Chronicle document that the city remained crippled by fear. Tourism fell to an all-time low; hotel prices plummeted; stores and restaurants closed for lack of business; cultural events failed to attract audiences. When night fell, the city by the bay became a ghost-town.

The rampage made the Nation of Islam the bloodiest domestic terrorist group in US history, yet no law enforcement or government figure, in this heyday of the Civil Rights movement, opted to take the Muslim organization to task, let alone to expose Elijah Poole as the instigator of mass murder. At the heart of the matter remained the fact that the Nation of Islam was a “religion” with thousands of adherents and even more supporters. As a “religion,” it was protected by a battery of constitutional rights. The first line of the first article of the Bill of Rights reads:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

Doing anything that contravened these words would create a legal maelstrom that would result in the loss of a juridical or governmental position and personal costs beyond calculation. And so the real cause of the murders was neither addressed nor uprooted.

Nation of Islam – An Empty Legacy – Family Security Matters Archive 9 Mar 2007
[…]
While the Nation of Islam was riven into factions, following the 1975 death of Elijah Muhammad, Yusuf Bey, a captain of the group, negotiated a meeting in 1979 between Farrakhan and Silis Muhammad, leader of a breakaway faction…

Born Joseph H. Stevens in Greeneville, Texas, in 1935, Bey moved with his parents to Oakland at the age of 5. He joined the US Air Force at age 17, and after four years he was honorably discharged. A qualified cosmetologist, Bey ran beauty salons in Oakland Santa Barbara, before opening a bakery in Santa Barbara in 1968 which later became “Your Black Muslim Bakery”. He became involved with the Nation of Islam in 1964, and in 1971 moved his bakery to the East Bay. The bakery sold produce free of artificial colorants, with no refined sugar, fats or preservatives.

Bey had a weekly cable show called True Solutions in which he gave a platform to Elijah Muhammad’s views. He even ran for the position of Mayor of Oakland. He died on September 30, 2003 of colon cancer, having established an empire running housing, a school, a security firm and retail businesses, including Your Black Muslim Bakery. At the time of his death, he was engaged in a legal battle with a woman who claimed he had first raped her in 1982 when she was 13. She claimed she had been sexually abused by Yusuf Bey since the age of 10.

As members of Bey’s family vied for the position of successor, violence broke out. On February 27, Waajid Aljawwaad Bey, president and CEO of the bakery, vanished. His rotting corpse was later found in a shallow grave in the Oakland Hills. In June 2005, Bey’s adopted son John was wounded by a gunman in an ambush, and on October 25, Yusuf’s 24-year old son Antar Bey was shot dead at a gas station. Nineteen-year old Yusuf Bey IV appeared to have taken over the leadership – he was indicted for smashing up Muslim-owned liquor stores in Oakland, events which happened a month after Antar Bey was killed. One store was torched, and an employee was locked in the trunk of a car. The tactic of wrecking premises had been employed under the leadership of Bey senior – in 1994 a rival laundry had been trashed by Black Muslims.

In January 2006, Yusuf Bey IV said: “If you say you’re a Muslim, you should have the action of a Muslim. If you say you’re going to be a Muslim and a follower of Mohammed you should have the actions of following Mohammed, not selling drugs or selling alcohol, or selling things in your store that’s not good for our people. That’s killing our people.”

As an example of a good Muslim, Bey is seriously wanting – indicted on a grand theft auto charge, he attended strip joints and was indicted in April 2006 for attempted murder.

The flaky mythology and hollow spirituality of the NoI has attracted narcissists who would go on to become dangerous. In October 2002, Nation of Islam member John Allen Muhammad and his sidekick Lee Boyd Malvo went on a shooting spree in the Washington area that saw 10 people shot dead and three people injured…http://www.fsmarchives.org/article.php?id=794394

From Texas to Oakland, the elder Bey’s path to the bakery | The Chauncey Bailey Project
From Texas to Oakland, the elder Bey’s path to the bakery
August 2nd, 2009

From the beginning, Yusuf Bey’s business and religious endeavors were wracked with disputes, controversy and violence.

Bey was born Joseph H. Stephens in Greenville, Texas, near Dallas, on Dec. 21, 1935, to Ruth and Theron Stephens. At age 5, his family moved to Oakland, where he later attended Oakland Technical High School, according to a brief life history he prepared. After four years in the Air Force, from 1952 to 1956, he went to Santa Barbara Cosmetology School and from 1960 to 1973 he owned Red Carpet Coiffeurs beauty salons in Santa Barbara and Berkeley, he said. In later years, his followers called him Dr. Bey.

Joseph became a follower of Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad in the early 1960s, when he was 27 or 28 years old, he told reporters 15 years ago. In the 1960s, his brother Billy X Stephens was the minister of a Nation of Islam mosque in Santa Barbara and Joseph was secretary.

In an early sign of trouble, a member of the Santa Barbara mosque wrote a letter to Nation of Islam leaders in Chicago in 1968 complaining that he had been forced to burn two of the Stephens family Cadillacs in an insurance fraud scheme.

On Aug. 17, 1968, he and his wife were slain with a .30-.30 rifle as they slept. The slayings were never solved. The police investigation focused mainly on Billy X.

“The word out on the street now by local Muslems is that ‘Justice has been served,'”‰” Santa Barbara police Chief Jack Hawe noted three days after the killings. Billy X denied any wrongdoing.

Two years later, the Stephens brothers moved to Oakland to open another mosque at Elijah Muhammad’s request. In 1973, Joseph gave up his beauty salons to work in the East Bay bakery his father had started in 1968. He took the Muslim name Yusuf Bey and started a Nation of Islam splinter group that became Your Black Muslim Bakery. He later described himself in sermons to bakery members as being more a follower of Elijah Muhammad than of the Nation of Islam.

Muhammad, who died in 1975 at age 77, glorified blacks, denounced whites, promoted separatism, black empowerment and healthy living and built paramilitary squads of young men to instill discipline. He stressed the importance of black entrepreneurs, and he started bakeries, schools and other businesses. At times he condoned violence, and though married he had sex with multiple women, according to “The Messenger,” a 2001 biography by Washington Post Online Editor Karl Evanzz. Muhammad became a multimillionaire and had 22 children, according to court records in the probate of Muhammad’s estate.

San Francisco Chronicle
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
Bey IV continued his father’s practice of delivering fiery Black Muslim sermons to bakery followers. In one videotaped sermon dated to July of 2007, Bey IV said, “We fight the government, we fight the police, we fight our own families, we fight our own people, and we fight Caucasian people daily – just to do right.”

One month before the slaying of a journalist who was investigating Your Black Muslim Bakery, the bakery’s young leader urged his followers to be “strong soldiers” and combat the many enemies he said were conspiring to bring down the embattled Oakland institution.

“We fight the government, we fight the police, we fight our own families, we fight our own people, and we fight Caucasian people daily – just to do right,” Yusuf Bey IV declared in a fiery videotaped sermon obtained recently by The Chronicle.

“They use our own people to go against us – people like you or I – to go against a strong organization like Your Black Muslim Bakery,” he also said. “It’s going to take strong men to stand up, it’s going to take strong soldiers to stand up and do something for ourselves.”

The sermon, delivered sometime in July, presaged the Aug. 2 street corner shooting death of Chauncey Bailey, editor of an African American community newspaper, who had been working on a story about infighting and financial problems at the bakery.

Arrested on unrelated kidnapping and torture charges after Bailey’s death, Bey IV denied complicity in the journalist’s murder. But police quoted Bey IV as saying Bailey had slandered his late father, bakery founder Yusuf Bey, who died in 2003.

Meanwhile, the bakery handyman who confessed to the slaying, Devaughndre Brouassard, 19, told police he had killed the journalist to be a “strong soldier,” according to an investigator’s notes – the same words Bey IV used in the sermon. Broussard later recanted and is awaiting trial.

A video recording of another Bey IV sermon from 2007 also provides insights into the bakery’s close relationship with former Oakland Police Chief Joseph Samuels, now a federal airport official in Florida. Bey IV declared that Samuels had “told all his officers: Leave Your Black Muslim Bakery alone, they’re brothers.”

By contrast, Bey IV said current Chief Wayne Tucker, whose officers at the time were investigating Bey IV’s followers on suspicion of a long list of crimes, was a “racial devil.”

Bey IV, 21, delivered the sermons at a time of turmoil. Unable to pay the mortgage and payroll taxes, he had put the bakery into bankruptcy. He also was awaiting trial on charges of directing the trashing of two Oakland liquor stores, reportedly because they were violating religious law by selling alcohol to black people. Much of his vast family had sided against him in a bitter and allegedly violent power struggle that had begun after his late father died of cancer while awaiting trial for rape.

In both videos, he stands at the pulpit in the bakery’s San Pablo Avenue compound, portraits of his late father and Nation of Islam founders W.D. Fard and Elijah Muhammad hanging on the wall behind him, and urges his followers to defend the bakery against its enemies.

“Anybody out to get Your Black Muslim Bakery or sabotage Your Black Muslim Bakery, God has plans to go right back against you,” he said in the July sermon. “This is the reason that after 45 years, we’re still in business.”
The bakery, he said, has endured because God acts against its enemies.
“As long as you are doing what God wants you to do, and God is in your favor – excuse my language – the hell with everybody else,” he said.

In the July sermon at the bakery, Bey IV urged action against African Americans whom he said were being used by the “clear enemy today,” the white power structure, to oppress blacks. He made no specific reference to Bailey or his newspaper, the Oakland Post.

“We have a black mayor and City Council members, we have black people in city government – we have black police sergeants and police chiefs,” he said. “But instead of using your job and your ways against your people, use them to benefit your people.”

He also complained repeatedly that the bakery was being harassed by authorities and expressed puzzlement that other community groups weren’t coming to its aid.

“There should be no reason in the world that they can harass an organization like this, and our preachers don’t come out and give us a hand, or our Muslim brothers don’t come out and assist us,” he said. “It’s OK, because, as Dr. Bey says, anything that is weak is wicked, and anything that is wicked, we can’t use in this organization.

“But it’s good to know that we have strong brothers here,” Bey IV said. “You give us a little more time, and I guarantee you, you are going to see what we have to offer.”

Bey IV also alluded to the bakery’s financial problems. “How in the hell can you pass up Your Black Muslim Bakery when we sell all-natural food for the human body?” he asked.

“But you’ll pass this bakery up to go buy bread from Pakistan, or go buy bread from Safeway, all because you don’t like Your Black Muslim Bakery, or you don’t like what we say in here, you don’t like what we do here,” he said, and then go to “the white man’s establishment … and you are going to patronize him.”

Bey urged his followers to be strong in tough times. “I don’t care how bad it might look, if you really believe in God, have faith in God and less faith in the damn white man, you’ll be a lot better off.”

In the other sermon, which could not be dated with certainty, Bey IV discussed the bakery’s complicated relationship with police – praising Samuels, who was Oakland’s first black chief, while vilifying the current chief, Tucker.

Bey IV said most black officers did the bidding of the white establishment, but Samuels “understood what we were doing” and “never harassed us” at the bakery.

“He told all his officers: Leave Your Black Muslim Bakery alone, they’re brothers, helping people just like you and I (and) saving brothers that look like you and I,” Bey IV said. “So leave them alone. So what did they do? When he got too close to Dr. Yusuf Bey, when he got too close to the organization, they shipped him off to Sacramento somewhere.

“Because anybody that is going to help our people,” he said, “they are going to get rid of.”

Actually, Samuels became police chief in Richmond after he was fired a decade ago by then-Mayor Jerry Brown. Samuels has declined to comment about the bakery.

Bey IV said Chief Tucker was “the most wicked devil in the world.

“You look at him. You see how he acts. You talk to him one day. When he talks, he’s like a racial devil,” he said.

Bey IV nonetheless bragged that the bakery was not intimidated by law enforcement.

“Nobody stands up to the police department in our community but Your Black Muslim Bakery, isn’t that right?” he said.

Bey IV referred to a June 30 traffic stop in which a rookie officer tried to cite him for driving without license plates. Police called for backup, citing previous incidents of “hostile crowds forming around officers” who had stopped bakery followers, according to the police report.

“What makes them call 20 police officers in Oakland, on a Friday night, knowing that you have all kinds of things happening in Oakland, knowing you have all kinds of murders probably taking place right now?” Bey IV said.

Resistance, Bey IV said in the sermon, is essential for black people.

“I’ll tell you one thing: If you don’t put this police department in check, we gonna put them in check,” he said. “Now you would think that if we was just young brothers changing our lives around in a righteous way should get all kinds of people over here to patronize an organization like Your Black Muslim Bakery.”

He said his organization was going to try to go about things in an “honorable way” but could stand just “so much” action against it “before things start happening.”

“They would respect us – they might not like us, but you gotta respect us,” he said, citing the way it turned around the lives of convicts and poor people.

Oakland police raided the bakery after Bailey’s slaying. Broussard was arrested in the killing. Bey IV and two followers were charged with kidnapping and torturing two women, allegedly because they thought the victims could lead them to a drug dealer’s stash of money.

Broussard confessed to the slaying after he was allowed to talk to Bey IV at a police station where they were both being held. His lawyer now says Bey IV coerced him into making a false confession for the good of the bakery.

60 Minutes Interview Transcript Of Confessed Chauncey Bailey Killer
March 21, 2011 10:22 AM
OAKLAND (CBS) – In February 2008, “60 Minutes” reported on the murder of Oakland journalist Chauncey Bailey, whose death has been linked to an investigation he was conducting into a controversial local business called “Your Black Muslim Bakery.”
[…]
BROUSSARD: It was like the black man army.
COOPER: It was like the black man army?
BROUSSARD: The black man’s army.
COOPER: So when he tells you that, you know, you gotta do this, you gotta—you gotta plead guilty. You gotta say you killed Chauncey Bailey, what’d you think?
[…] COOPER: So they just bring you in a room with Yusuf Bey IV?
BROUSSARD: They just brung me in a room with him.
COOPER: What was the first thing he said to you?
BROUSSARD: He was telling me how I gotta take this case. He was persuading me to take this case. He was telling me that—he was telling me like, you know, “You gotta do this for us. You gotta do this for the Bakery.
[…] COOPER: Were you Muslim? Or are you Muslim?
BROUSSARD: At first, when I went there I wasn’t—I wasn’t—I wasn’t—I wasn’t a Muslim or I wasn’t practicing Islam or what not. I was just taking it as—as it was a job. But then I realized like my—I gotta—gotta open up. Then I—I start—I started feeling what they was talking about. Like it was—it was good stuff, what they was talking about. And then, so I started—I started practicing. I started practicing Islam.
COOPER: Do you consider yourself Muslim now?
BROUSSARD: Yes, I do.
COOPER: So on August 3rd you told police that—that you killed Chauncey Bailey. You then later on, a couple days later, said that you didn’t. Why did you say that you killed him?
BROUSSARD: I didn’t kill Chauncey Bailey. I gave—I gave the false answers to the—to the Oakland Police because I was overcome by emotion.
COOPER: What do you mean?
BROUSSARD: Because of what Yusuf Bey IV was telling me. He told me that—he was telling me how—how I was being tested by God. He was telling me I didn’t realize I was being tested by God. He was telling me that—
COOPER: He said that God was testing you?
BROUSSARD: Yes, he did.
COOPER: How?
BROUSSARD: He was saying that—that—that at one point people gotta prove that—you gotta—you gotta prove your loyalty and what not.
COOPER: Loyalty to whom or to what?
BROUSSARD: You gotta prove your loyalty to the Bakery. And you gotta prove your loyalty to God. And then, so he was telling me that if I say I admit to this and I say that I did this, that they would release everybody. He was telling me that they was holding everybody that they arrested as suspects in the murder of Mr. Chauncey Bailey.
COOPER: So he told you that there were other people being held from the Bakery in Chauncey Bailey’s murder?
BROUSSARD: Yes, he did.
COOPER: And that by testifying, by saying that you killed him, everyone else would go free?
BROUSSARD: He was saying that if I say I did this, that they would release everybody. Because that’s—that’s what they was holding them for. He was telling me that—he was telling me how well he knew the police officers or what not.
COOPER: How he knew what?
BROUSSARD: How well he knew the police officers. Because he said that they was like his, I guess, his friends and what not. He was telling me that—
COOPER: He said the police were his friends?
BROUSSARD: Yeah, one of the detectives, I guess, he knew—I guess he knew him kind of well or what not. Because they was—you know, they was—they was saying—there was—there was talking—they was talking like—like they knew each other. He was—he was—then he’s telling me that if I say I did this, I would get no more than a county year.
COOPER: He said you would just get a year.http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2011/03/21/60-minutes-transcript-of-convicted-chauncey-bailey-killer-interview/

Motive

VDARE.com: 06/16/09 – Cal State’s Brian Levin And The Case Of The … –
16 Jun 2009 – In July 2007, Michael Wills, a white man, was shot and killed by two members of Your Black Muslim Bakery. … as they were discussing a string of racially motivated murders in the 1970s known as the Zebra killings.

Oakland Devaughndre Broussard Says 36-Year-old Michael Wills Was Killed Because He Was White

Published by Staff Writer on April 29, 2009

[…]

Broussard said Bey told him “he got a devil” after Wills was killed. Broussard said at first Bey “was using ‘devil’ like a white devil, like all white people are devils, and then he started using it in the term of a mentality.” Broussard said Bey explained that “a black man can be a devil also if he against his people.” The bakery handyman said Mackey told him that he shot Wills…

Broussard Gets 25 Years For Bailey Shooting, Another – News Story – KTVU San Francisco
Posted: 6:51 pm PDT August 12, 2011 Updated: 10:19 am PDT August 13, 2011
OAKLAND, Calif. — The man who killed journalist Chauncey Bailey by shooting him three times at point-blank range while he was walking to work in downtown Oakland four years ago was sentenced Friday to 25 years in state prison…
Devaughndre Broussard, 23, could have faced life in prison for killing Bailey, 57, on Aug. 2, 2007, and a second man, Odell Roberson Jr., 31, on July 8, 2007, as he initially was charged with two counts of murder.
But on May 7, 2009, prosecutors allowed Broussard to plead guilty to two counts of the lesser charge of voluntary manslaughter and receive a shorter prison term in exchange for his testimony against Your Black Muslim Bakery Yusuf Bey IV.
[…] Krum said Bey was also upset at Bailey for writing articles about the child molestation charges that his father, bakery founder Yusuf Bey, was facing at the time of his death at age 67 in 2003.
The prosecutor said Bey ordered that Roberson be killed on July 8, 2007, because Roberson was the uncle of the man who was convicted of murdering Bey’s brother, Antar Bey, in 2005.
Prosecutors said they believe Bey ordered the deaths of Bailey, Roberson and a third man, 36-year-old Michael Wills, who was killed in Oakland on July 12, 2007. Krum said Bey also ordered that Wills be killed because he was inspired by the “Zebra Killers,” a group of black men who killed white people in San Francisco in the early 1970s… Grim said Broussard “has good plans for the future” and wants to become an imam in the Muslim faith and “preach a compassionate version of Islam.”http://www.ktvu.com/news/28853378/detail.html

Humbling of the pharoah | Anne Penketh | Independent The …
blogs.independent.co.uk [3 August, 2011]
The received opinion in the West in recent days has been that nothing has changed in Egypt since the downfall of Mubarak…